9/11 Memories

I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar; that much is true. But even then-- Wait a tick! Wrong story. That's a song, isn't it?

Dear Penthouse, I never thought something like this could happen to me, but-- Shit, no, that's... just a side gig.

I dunno. I totally forgot what I was going to share. Something was supposed to have happened today, right? Was it that thing with the computer that went crazy and turned that dude into a giant space baby?

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Wight Now

Every year, Alice Cooper looks a little more like Trampier's Wight illustration from the First Edition Monster Manual.

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The Art Police

I don't usually share stuff here if all I've got is a link, but this is worth spreading around and I don't have anything to add right now. Here's a couple of quotes, anyway:

There’s a rising wave of attacks on art and authors which often involve not just misreadings or bad faith readings, but no readings. Actually reading the work in question—beyond perhaps one out-of-context screenshot—is no requirement, apparently, for attacking the author, demanding work get pulled, and requesting public flagellation.

. . .They view art as a series of moral lessons that must be entirely unambiguous. Reading the tweets during these scandals, you see the same claims over and over again. Stories must be uplifting, characters "likable," messages clear, and all bad or messy or immoral lines/characters/events must be explicitly rebutted in the text. (At times you sense they want the author to write "this is bad!" and "this is good!" in the margins of every page.)

https://countercraft.substack.com/p/art-should-be-a-doorway-not-a-mirror

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Gamma

I love how Ewing handles the difference between what Marvel gamma rays do and what real gamma rays do in Immortal Hulk. Instead of piling on more pseudo-science that someone in the future will just end up reconning, he embraces the mysticism of a world where radiation can make you a super-hero.

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Maybe Games

Games I've been thinking about running but probably won't:

• OSE Greyhawk campaign, using the Mage instead of Magic-User, Druids but no Clerics, PCs all human except for race-as-class Half-Elves and Half-Orcs, and a few other alterations.
• Star Wars using the original d6 game, starting just after the original movie.
• Darker Trails, the Call of Cthulhu supplement for Wild West type stuff.
• The UNIT Files, using the Doctor Who RPG UNIT sourcebook with more of an X-Files feel than Doctor Who. I guess that's kind of like what Torchwood pretended to be for a while before it went completely off the rails. And yeah, this could go off the rails too, but that's okay if I'm the engineer.

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The Scary Magic Forest

I watched the 2016 Blair Witch movie tonight. The first movie was a great prank when you look at all the stuff they did leading up to its release, but what keeps bringing me back to these movies is that, despite the title, they're really about the forest. There's probably another name for the archetype it tapped into, but I call it the Scary Magic Forest. 

The first thing you find out when you wander into the Scary Magic Forest is that it's bigger than it should be, and whatever you're using to find your way is going to fail you. Time is often distorted or just lost. Weird stuff happens. Maybe there are monsters, but maybe not. Often there's a heart of the forest which you probably should not hang out in. If you've ever tromped around in a forest, you know what inspired all this. I love Scary Magic Forest stories. 

This movie. . . I'm glad I watched it. It could have been great. There was a lot of good material, and a lot of stuff that was genuinely scary. It lived up to its Scary Magic Forest promise. Unfortunately, someone on the team decided the movie need a ton of cheap shaky-cam jump scares that, rather than keeping the tension high, eventually made all my sympathy kind of callous over. I'd still recommend giving it a look, I guess.

Dream Trap

Something funny happened in a dream the other night. I was exploring a cave with a fairly large group of people. It was, ostensibly, Clay Cave, a real world cave that I've been in two or three times. We stopped in a little restaurant in the cave called Hazel's Nook.

Hazel's Nook is the name of a real restaurant, but it's nothing like this place. The name was probably in my head because I had been looking at a novelty map of Gulf Shores earlier. The dream version was kind of like an underground sidewalk cafe with strings of colored lights between the stalactites. 

Anyway, I realized it was a dream. Part of my reasoning was that obviously there wasn't a restaurant in Clay Cave and that this restaurant was really in the mall. Only, I was still confused, because, like I said, the Hazel's Nook I had been to was nothing like this, and not in a mall. Also, I have never been to a place that looked like this in the mall. That's not the best part, though.

I went around the table, asking the people with me what they thought the name of the place was because, if we were dreaming, we might have inconsistent perceptions. It didn't occur to me that none of these people were real. My dead brother said something like "rakes" and my dead friend rattled off a bunch of consonants that didn't spell anything (sorry, I can't remember what they were). A woman at our table who I didn't recognize from real life said this place was a trap and we should leave. 

Our table and a few other people from the larger group, but not all of them, left the cave and went exploring the hills, finding rocky trails to overlooks and oriental ruins and other cool stuff.